The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe somebody’s trying to tell me something but lately I’ve been invited to a couple of what I thought were merely get-togethers at local watering holes, a few friends, some new, some old, that turned into preliminary meetings for possible men’s groups.  We could meet monthly, share our latest medical insults, discuss erectile dysfunction remedies, ponder strategies for dealing with the Big D.  All items I might consider useful … just before the nurse yanks the IV’s out and disconnects the ventilator.  The thought of a drum circle of old farts mulling over geriatric distresses, reading treatises on the Final Stage, swapping surgical intrusions and offering comradely commiserations, trust me, if I want to feel old I can do it on my own just fine, thanks.  Insofar as prescriptions for how to cope with geezerhood, I got my own ideas that don’t need to be passed around the tavern table.

Maybe the boyz are going through some ‘stage’ of life, no doubt Chapter 8 in the Aged Man’s Guide to Peace of Mind.  Me, not so much.  Course that might change when I’m diagnosed with (Chapter 2 — Pathologies of the Mature Male), but for now I’m fine with the aches and pains, the soft tissue injuries that take four times longer than when I was young, the memory loss and …, well, no need to write my own book here, there are plenty of tomes to choose from.  And yeah, the Plague Years were a treat.  Lost about 20 friends and neighbors in a little over a year, (Chapter 6 of Grief and Loss for Seniors) what might for some of us lead to troubled inquiries into the tenuousness of our brief existence on this planet, but I’m a yahoo who thinks life is probably long enough, no point reaching for the Methuselah cure and an old age of dementia and parts replacement.  (Chapter 2 —Forget You Have Alzheimers and Enjoy Television).

The boyz are a good crew, plenty enjoyable to quaff a pint or two with, crack wise, compare the latest anecdotes of lives that are more interesting than most, one-up each other since half of us are amateur comics, musicians, filmmakers, writers and fellow artists, what, in a different time and place, might come to be referred to, like the Hudson School or the Paris Group, the Vienna Café or Greenwich Village, as the Camano School.  But that isn’t going to happen either, not if I can help it.  Art, like aging, is not a team sport.  We worked alone all our lives, struggling with our demons and with our muses, by our lonesome.  Too late now to call the hotline for assistance.  Why on earth would anyone think we moved to the South End if we were searching for counseling or consolation or support?  We wanted that, we’d have moved to Stanwoodopolis and whiled away the hours at the Duck Inn with the farmers and the fishermen.  Too late now, boyz.  Too late now.

I just came from a would-be shopping trip to my usual grocery store, the big box one in downtown Stanwoodopolis (name withheld by advise from my attorney).  With my cart only a quarter full I rounded the final corner in the last lap to the checkout stand, hoping for one that might have one or two carts, a short wait, but no, the three lanes were backed up into the aisles, the self-check back to the rear of the store, so with my usual penchant for patience I settled in and waited my turn behind a couple of carts crammed with enough groceries to weather a winter, plus two or three small carts with about the amount I had.  I figured five minutes, I’d be at the conveyor.

Five minutes nothing had moved.  It was like a Twilight Zone episode, the one where the shoppers never move an inch.  Fifteen minutes and everyone is looking around, wondering same as me, what the ?%$#.  Since I couldn’t see my checker, I assumed we had a new hire, some poor victim stressed beyond anything manageable and who had suffered either a stroke or had simply gone catatonic, frozen over the barcode scanner.  The guy in front of me gave me a quizzical look of frustration so I asked what day he’d gotten here.  Comedy, you might not need to be told, isn’t much appreciated when you’ve become trapped in long lines that do not move.  Down at the other checkouts some progress seemed to be made, not much, but some and by now it was too late to lane change.

Twenty minutes and a couple of pass-bys from the Manager, a mackerel faced administrative type unbothered by the fact that ten minutes ago he had tried not to make eye contact with me and yet here I was again, rooted to the same spot.  I asked if they would be bringing porta-potties soon for the folks with incontinent problems.  Again, humor is not what was needed here.  Maybe a couple more of those unopened self-check lines might be, but no, I guess not.

Twenty five minutes later I’m expecting Rod Serling to wander out of the produce section, maybe offer a short summation of this day’s episode.  ‘The townsfolk may have asked themselves if this was nothing more than an alien experiment to determine if grocery line gridlock might lead to civil unrest.  Some may still be there with their thawed pizzas and their melted ice cream.  But rest assured, they’ll always be checking out … in the Twilight Zone.’

Thirty minutes later and another pass-by from the unharried Manager, I noticed a cart peeking out from Aisle 6, queued up for the checkout stand half a dozen of us had been waiting for in Aisle 5.  It didn’t take Rod Serling to script the moment when the two lines converged, each confident that we were next.  My cart would be the one to meet Aisle 6’s cart  and obviously the lady who never quite figured out where the end of our line had been would think, well, you know damn well what she’d think and then ….

I gave up rather than lock carts with another frustrated customer and pushed my way through a forest of stalled grocery wagons to the self-check, figuring anything was better than another half hour even if I bullied my way in front of the lady in the wrong line.  Course when I reached the self-check at the other end of the store, that line stretched to the end of the aisle, possibly out the storage area and into the loading area.  A guy at the head of the conga line jabbed an angry thumb at me in case I tried to jump the line, pointing off into an infinity of basket carriers and shopping cart victims.

I don’t know how many shoppers succumbed to dehydration or heart failure.  I don’t know if the Red Cross set up shelters by the dairy department to tend to the fallen.  I do know I was the only one to abandon his cart and stumble to the front door.  When they count the fatalities, I hope my cart doesn’t send the authorities looking for its owner, some poor schmuck frozen back in the freezers when confusion sent him reeling, another casualty of the grocery industry prior to its proposed merger of the two national supermarkets.  The merger that should, little doubt in this former shopper’s mind, solve most of their checkout problems.

Right.

I got plenty of friends who are looking for a love interest after pretty much giving up finding a compatible life partner down at the Stanwoodopolis Hotel or the Boxcar Tavern, don’t ask me why but apparently the pickings have been picked over.  They’ve tried joining a few groups, everything from pilate to art guilds, but the dating pool is small and most aren’t single anyway.  An affair isn’t really what they’re looking for.  Or at least that’s what they tell me.

So with options shrinking faster than glaciers in Africa they’ve turned to the 21^st equivalent of matchmaking, joining an online dating site, posting their photos and interests, editing their lives down to a paragraph that hopefully will make them attractive to potential buyers.  Meaning, they probably lie about their age, their weight, photoshop their pictures, exaggerate their interests, mention that they love walks on the beach and cuddling on the couch, adore cute puppies, never smoke or drink or do drugs … or at least only in moderation.

Now most of my loveless pals are no longer youngsters, oddly enough.  In fact, we’re, if we’re honest with ourselves (something unsuitable for Tinder or other dating sites), actually Geezers.  An age bracket that you might think would be notable for its honest acceptance of who we are in this latter stage of life.  Dater, know thyself!  But of course this is the internet … where truth goes to die.  And in this new Darwinian universe of mate selection, advertisement is everything.  Consequently, those first dates make fine grist for late night commiserations over a few adult beverages when they regale me with love gone wrong stories.

One of my pals puts on his resume that he would rather drink horse piss than date a MAGA maiden … or something to that effect, maybe more subtle, but his message is clear.  You voted for the Trumpster, don’t answer this ad.  Better to sleep alone, apparently.  And yet.  And yet!!  Invariably he gets to that first luncheon date with a potential Miss Right only to discover fairly soon that Miss Right is really Miss Rightwing, she just didn’t think it would be all that important when it came to lifelong spousal choices.

And so it goes, love on the digital highway.  After a few bad connections, dates that were easier back in high school and long lulls in conversation, I can see why a lot of my cronies eventually give up, realizing that a few decades of living alone have ossified into an inability to compromise much at, oh, 65 or older.  Explains, I guess partly, why they’ve finally decided they’re happily unmarried.  If nothing else, us geezers have accrued no little wisdom in our advanced years.  It just takes a few times in the dating rodeo to figure that out.

Lately I’ve been reading about a new phenomenon out there in the world of media sociology: the lack of men working manly jobs.  If I’m to believe the statistics, a lot of Help Wanted postings are going unfilled.  And the reason, these analysts speculate, is that us men are unwilling to do MANual labor.  Ya think?

Down here in the canary-filled mines of the South End, any manjack of us could have told these sociologists the trend is real.  But we could also have informed them that the danger is not as dire as they seem to be suggesting.  We’ve been work averse for most of our lives without undue harm to the island’s economic well-being, only to our own.  Putting economics aside, the psychological and spiritual benefits of, okay let’s call it male malaise, have been substantial. Sure, divorce rates might have spiked but that only means that the women were freed to take on the work us lazy good-for-nothings left open.  A small loss for marital happiness.  But a big win for women’s liberation.

Plenty of women in the ‘hood here chop their own wood, haul their own water, build their own sheds, keep the hearth fires burning … and still manage to raise the kids and work a 40 hour week.  You think they’re unhappy?  Ask any of them and they’ll tell you what liberation is all about:  not having some deadbeat husband under foot telling them what they ought to do but not do one damn thing himself.  You think they’re looking for a replacement, think again.

What I worry about and the media sociologists ought to too is the next generation, the kids who think work is anything but physical labor.  They’ve grown up with video games, smartphones, apps, laptops, computers, digital toys, just about anything that glues them to their chairs.  Work?  It certainly doesn’t entail sweat or brawn.  Those days are history, my friend, relegated to the Cro-Magnon period, the one prior to Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of the Android Work Force.  Male malaise?  Why do you think we need immigrants?

Did I tell you the coming election cycle would be nothing, if not fun?  Well, at least comical.  I’m going to take a pass on the Herschel Walker Variety Show down there in the Peachy State.  Making fun of the poor guy at this point would be tantamount to sadistic cruelty.  Making fun of the Crackers who would vote for him might be fair game, but now that the Donald is back on the campaign trail, the oxygen in that room is long ago depleted.

One thing you have to give credit to the Trumpster for – or maybe Roy Cohn – is the ability, the tenacity, the mule-headedness to stick to his story.  Dammit, the election was stolen from him.  You remember the election, don’t you?, the last one, oh, must be a couple years ago now, a millennium in the digital age.  Well, HE remembers it and he wants to remind you again and again it was STOLEN!  Go ahead and show him the statistics, the lawsuits thrown out, the recounts … it doesn’t matter, don’t you GET IT, the election was, say it after me, STOLEN!  And because it was STOLEN! anything to right that wrong, to correct that error, to overturn the results is permissible if not mandatory.

Even, it turns out according to the man the election was STOLEN! from, even if it means abandoning the Constitution of the United States.  What good is that ancient testament if it allows the election of the President to be, yup, STOLEN!  Write a new one, or better yet, let the rightful winner of that STOLEN! election make his own Constitution, a fairer one, an honest one, a revised and improved one.  One that enshrines what a little less than half the national population believes is true.  Magical thinking, yeah, but correct and proper magical thinking.  The man is not only a genius with a very big brain, he’s a conduit for Truth, THE conduit for Truth as a matter of fact.   Why do you think he calls his social media platform Truth Social?  The Wizard is In!  24/7.

Me, I believe the man.  I think he really does think the election was STOLEN!  He can no more imagine being a Loser than he can imagine Melania leaving him for Herschel Walker.  You don’t get to fire Donald J Trump, he does the firing.  Didn’t you see his TV show?  Bam, big successful businessman points his nubby little finger and sayonara, buddy, you’re gone, out the door, head down, beaten, deflated, a loser.  Him, not Donald. Him.  Every episode.  Every time.  Lose?  No way!!  NO WAY, amigo!!

Give the guy another chance, all I’m saying.  No, not to be Prez again even if it was STOLEN!  But give him another TV show.  Call it FIRED!!  Haul out a dusty Declaration of Independence and give it the old heave-ho.  Bill of Rights?  Time to put a match to those.  You want to wake up the woke, what better way than slice and dice the Constitution and a few other old moldy antiquated documents from slave owning times.  Freedom of Speech Amendment, here’s the Door!  Right to bear arms?  Why not legs!?  Cue the trumpets, we got another exit for the entertainment of our viewing audience.

Let him host it.  He’s not going away, obviously.  He’s never going away.  If you think that, you’re the one guilty of magical thinking….

A rose is a rose, so it’s said, and smells just as sweet by any other name.  Perusing our newspaper of record, the Crab Cracker now that the Stanwoodopolis Gazette has abdicated its role of reporting local news, I came across a notice that a new group had formed in the area for those coping with the loss of a loved one.  Death Café.  I know, I should be more sympathetic, possibly even supportive, might even be in need myself someday … but golly, Miss Molly, couldn’t they have come up with a better name?

Death Café.  I don’t know, it just … well, it just … it has a certain morbid and cadaverous quality to it.  I mean, you get to wondering what’s on the menu.  Eggs 6 feet under, easy over.  Soup de jour, eye of newt in a tomato bisque.  BLT’s, blood lettuce and tomato.  You can hardly stop yourself from imagining the worst sorts of breakfasts, lunches and dinners.  Zombieburgers, cooked rare.

But these are the times we live in.  Touchy-feely in a modern and alienated world.  Probably better than a bunch of tweets from people you barely know on Twitter, I suppose, but c’mon, Death Café for the luvva…. ?  Why not, oh, I don’t know, Heaven’s Gate Diner, or Streets of Gold Chop House (okay,  maybe not), Pearly Gates Beanery, Adios Amigo Pizza Parlor, Ashes to Ashes Tavern —anything but Death Café, even Death Anonymous.

The trouble, of course, is a lot of us secular humanists, having renounced the old school religions of our parents (who are now gone too late for the Death Café), don’t know how to deal with our grief for the dearly departed since there’s no, let’s call it ‘closure’.  Imagine there’s no heaven, Lennon sang.  No hell below us, above us only sky.  You think that’s going to make folks feel better when their loved one bites the bullet, think again.  John says you may think that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.  Swell, John, just swell.  He says he hopes one day we’ll join him and the world will live as one. One what?

If John were around today, he’d be the fry cook at the Death Café, no doubt about it.  Actually, he’d be head chef at the Imagine Bar and Grill.  Happy Hour all day long….

Fairline Freddy was parked at his usual table at the Pilot Lounge with a few of his vintage car buddies, watching the ballgame Sunday and drinking early.  Sam and myself had just rolled in, said hello how are ya two IPA’s, thanks Jerry, then pulled up at the only open table next to Freddy’s.  The game by then was out of reach, hopelessly lost and the mood next door was decidedly unpleasant.  Nothing new there, I figured … and as usual was wrong.

‘So my daughter wanted a blowout wedding,’ Frank was saying, ‘big Hall, hundreds of people, Big She-Bang.  And she’s 35, husband is 40, been married once or twice already, him, I mean, but they want a Cinderella wedding and I’m spozed to foot the bill.’

‘You shoulda done like I did, Frank,’ Freddy says.  ‘Tell them to elope and you’ll give them a pile of cash.’

Frank shakes his head.  ‘I tried that, Fred, I offered them 10 grand but my baby wants a fancy wedding.  Cake, florist, five bridesmaids, an open bar at the reception.  That offer work for you?’

Frank confesses that it did not.  ‘I don’t get it either, Fred.  Kids nowadays want a splash, photographers, something special.  They been living together for four years, for godsake.’

‘But here’s the thing.  The Hall I rented for Her Highness, I took a tour the other day, see how it sets up, where the band goes, the bar, all that — yeah, yeah, a band, you believe that? — and the lady who runs the Hall shows me the back side door and there’s this bum sleeping in the doorway when we open it up.  You believe that?  Guy’s got a sleeping bag and sacks of god only knows what and he’s out cold middle of the damn morning.  So I tell the woman this guy had better not be here when we have this wedding, all I can say, and she says, get this, she says he sleeps there every night and he doesn’t have anywhere else to go.’

‘Looks to me like she’s dealt with this bum before and he just keeps coming back so I walk over to the guy, tap him with my boot to wake him up and I tell him if he comes back here he’ll be one sorry sonofabitch, now get moving.  That’s how you deal with freaks like this, probably some meth head, cops don’t want nothing to do with him, but hey, I don’t want him screwing up my kid’s special damn day, know what I mean?’

The table knows exactly what Frank means, nods all around, a couple of good for yous.  Sam, before I can drop an arm on his wrist as warning, feels compelled to weigh in, liberal snowflake that he is, the kind of man who thinks holding your tongue is tantamount to being complicit.  ‘Who deputized you, Frank? The guy bothering you or what?’

Frank says,’ hell yes he was bothering me! And so are you.’

‘Good,’ Sam says, ‘that’s the idea.  Who made you God?  Here’s some character, down on his luck, you don’t know one thing about him, parked in a doorway, cold, probably hungry …’

‘Hungry?’ Frank shouts, ‘the guy is holed up across from the damn Food Bank.  He’s eating 3 squares of free food a day, no job, no worries, life of Riley.’

‘Life of Riley?’  Sam is suddenly on full boil.  ‘Life of Riley, really?  You ever been homeless, Fred?  You ever go without a meal?  Ever lost a job?  Ever been down on your luck?  Have a little compassion, why don’tcha?  But naw, go over and kick the guy awake and threaten him, that’s nice, that’s big hearted.  Geez.’

Frank gives Sam a long woeful stare.  I’m expected fireworks, overturned tables, broken glasses, blood on the floor kind of violence.  But instead Frank suddenly deflates.  ‘I lost my job once, Sam’ he says in a quiet voice.  ‘Boeing laid me off and I lost my house.  My wife left me awhile after that so I lost her too.  She took our daughter and I got the boot.  I been there.  I didn’t live in an alley but I had to hole up in a friend’s basement for a year.  I know what bad luck is.  I just don’t want my daughter’s wedding screwed up for her.  That’s all I’m asking.  I’ve screwed up enough things for her.  She just wants this damn wedding to be special and I want everything to go okay. ‘

Our two tables go church quiet although the ballgame is still going, other tables are groaning and cheering, the place is full.  Sam fingers his glass and finally, after a long silence, holds it up to Frank.  ‘Cheers, Frank, you’ll have a great wedding for your daughter.  One she’ll appreciate.  You’re a good dad.’

‘Too late for that, Sam, too late for that.’  But Frank lifts his glass and so do the rest of us.  Too late for all of us, I think.  Later I’ll wonder where the guy in the doorway ended up, but for now, all is well in the world.  Or at least the Pilot Lounge….

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the President-in-Exile has to turn over his tax returns, much to the howls of Donald out there in the wilderness of Mar-a-Lago.  So unfair!  What the returns will show, according to testimony by his accountant, are losses every year for a decade.  700 million in 2009, 200 million the following year.  Chump change for a highly successful businessman like His Highness, proof once again for his minions that the man knows how to navigate the system.

In other words, you paid more than Donald J Trump in taxes most of your life.

Digest that for a few minutes.  Or a day or two.  Even if you believe that the man who claims to be one of the richest men in America honestly made money by losing fortunes every year for a decade, an extraordinary feat even for the Trumpster, you might question if this is the right man to drain the swamp.  Or you might wonder if this is why Republicans fight tooth and nail to defund the IRS.  Donald claimed he couldn’t turn over his returns because of ongoing audits by the IRS.  Ya think?

And do ya think the corporations that manage to avoid paying federal taxes year after year thanks to loopholes, subsidies, deferments, offshore accounting and all the other sleight-of-hands by teams of tax accountants willing to fight for shady offsets and deductions, full knowing the audits aren’t coming so why not, do ya think this is smart business?

Most of you get your taxes taken out directly through your employer, not much wiggle room for sneaky deductions.  You pay more than one of the richest guys in the country.  Maybe you think this is fair.  He gets rich and you pay for the schools and fire fighters.  He lives like a pooh-bah while you fund the building of highways and bridges.  He rents hotels to government visitors at astronomical prices while you have the honor of hiring police and paying for the military.

Drain the swamp?  No, the alligators are doing fine just the way it is.  Vote for the guy again, why not?  But whatever you do, ask not what he can do for his country.  He expects you to ask that of yourself.  Thank you for your service, sucker!

So for some reason I’m riding down the road in my truck and decide to see what the conservative folks are talking about today, same as I used to before Trump got elected, test the roiling waters of the right wing, put a finger into the wind and see which way the tornado is blowing today.  My moderator begins by saying, “I heard this on some newsfeed this morning and I didn’t have time to fact check it.”

This is a familiar lead-in to any of us who listen to these talking heads on the far right.  Not enough time in the day to double check their sources, but hey, it sounds true to them and so my guy says, “well, let’s just go ahead and imagine it is true, go from there.”  This is like a scientist saying, okay, I haven’t got a clue if this hypothesis is accurate but why don’t we go ahead and build a theory around it, find out if we like the looks of it when we’re done.”

The story my agitator has supposedly, but I doubt, heard, revolves around the rumor which he declares is suspiciously plausible, that Joe Biden tried to cut a deal with the Saudis for a promise of drilling more oil.  He would, this rumor has it, offer amnesty to the crown prince Mohammed bin Salman for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.  He refers to the prince as MsB or maybe it’s MbS, either case, he tells his audience, you know who I mean.  Oil for amnesty.

Quid pro quo, maybe you remember the Trump deal in Ukraine, not that this will come up in the next half hour’s grinding of innuendo and speculation until the sausage is ready for the bun.  Now, to be fair, I have more time on my hands than our national Limbaugh clone so I punch up MbS and first article out of the chute is the CNN post that the U.S. Dep’t. of Justice cannot bring a case filed by Khashoggi’s wife because the guy happens to be the head of state.  They can’t sue Putin, they can’t extradite Xi, and no, they can’t bring a case against Mohammed either.  Kind of a different story than the unchecked one our national radio star is offering to listeners hungry for dirt on Sleepy Joe.

Now he knows his take is bullshit and I know his slant is bullshit and you probably know better than to even tune into talking heads like this … but, half the damn country listens to this boy and his ilk, twisting and fabricating and stretching the truth til it’s red meat down to the gristle for an audience starved for scapegoats and craving revenge.  You bet I turned my radio to a music station to remove the taste.  The true believers, I’m guessing they’re listening to this all day long.

I got a theory.  Not really based on anything I want to fact-check.  Just something I want you to believe.  Stay tuned.  Send money.  I’ll be back tomorrow with the news.

The rapper now called Ye, formerly Kanye West, made the pilgrimage this week to Mar-a-Lago, formerly a swamp near the Atlantic Ocean.  The President-in-Exile had invited Ye to a meeting, two very big brained men dining together and possibly discussing Trump’s 3^rd run at the White House when Kan-Ye surprised Donald by asking if he, Donald, would consider running as Vice President when Kan-Ye announces his own run and was then met with angry screams from the candidate who had already declared himself a presidential candidate.  When big brains clash, you have to expect explosions, I guess.

Apparently the tete-a-tete went downhill from there.  Mr. T purportedly made explicitly nasty comments about Kan-Ye’s ex-mizzus, the Queen Kardashian, mother of his children and so the chit chat rapidly slid downhill.  Nevertheless, the rapper turned politician released a two minute video of their encounter, Mar-a-Lago Debrief,  no doubt expecting potential voters might turn away from a man who loses his temper, calls Ye’s woman (bleep) and seems slightly if not totally unhinged.  Well, at least he gave Donald a chance to be his running mate which shows the incredible magnanimity of the rap star.  Despite his anti-Semitic remarks of late.  And the fact that he brought a couple of pals instrumental in white nationalist organizations.  The more the merrier in the clown car, looks like.

If you thought this would be a boring election cycle, you’ve been watching too much Tucker Carlson.  Hopefully you won’t be too troubled by the lack of policy statements, wonky analyses or cogent platforms.  The monkeys are out of their cages now and whoever was in charge has exited the premises.  Expect a barrel of laughs for the next few years.  My guess is Trump will make up and eventually ask Kan-Ye to run as his vice president.  Although … there are plenty of potential candidates to choose from.  Hopefully they won’t dial back on their meds.  We could use all the comedy we can get.